Why Booze Ruins Women’s Sleep

From disrupting sleep cycles to improving bone density, researchers are discovering that drinking affects women differently than men in all sorts of unexpected ways.

For the sleep deprived, alcohol is a fickle mistress. A glass of wine may help you go down for the night, but a few too many can send your sleep cycle into a tailspin. But until very recently, what no one knew was that for women, this is particularly true. It’s just one more way in which scientists say alcohol affects women differently than men.

The study, published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research indicates that women’s sleep is more easily disrupted by alcohol than men’s. Ninety-three subjects were given either a placebo or enough alcohol so that their BAL was .11 (most states consider .08 to be legally impaired), then monitored as they slept. Women reported feeling more tired before they went to bed than men did, and woke up more often during the night and stayed awake for more minutes, says Damaris J. Rohsenow, Ph.D., one of the study’s authors. Interestingly, the women did not report feeling sleepier than the men did after their night of tossing and turning. “They had worse sleep quality, but didn’t notice,” says Rohsenow, an associate director at the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University. (The mechanism for why women had more disrupted sleep than men did was not explained.)